Deployment to war doesn't figure in majority of military suicides

Nate Evans had three children depending on him and held down a good job running a hyperbaric chamber at a hospital. But what he really wanted was to go to war. In 2008, as the U.S. death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan approached 5,000, Evans became a medic in the Navy Reserve and was assigned to a Marine company. "He wanted in the trenches," said his wife, Catherine Evans. To her relief, he never deployed to either war. But that did not save him. Evans, 28, committed suicide last November near his home outside Salt Lake City — one of at least 524 U.S. service members who took their own lives in 2012. His case was hardly unusual. The most recent Pentagon data show that a slight majority — 52% — of troops who have committed suicide while on active duty were never assigned to Afghanistan or Iraq. The numbers, from the years 2008 to 2011, upend the popular belief that a large in...